almawang / dartbot-fb-bot

Messenger Bot for the DartBot project

DartBot-Tour Guide

Fb Bot for DartBot - The Virtual Tour Guide Bot DartBot (Tour Guide) provides prospective students with a tour of Dartmouth by (1) providing information about various locations across campus and directions to the next stop of the tour and (2) answering questions they may have using a Facebook Messenger ChatBot.

This repo contains the code for the Facebook Messenger Bot portion of the project.

Architecture

Our code is organized into three main repos: the API backend, the DartBot Tour Guide frontend and the Facebook Messenger bot using botkit. This repo stores JavaScript for our Facebook Messenger bot created using botkit.

Setup

Facebook requires a webhook for all communication; the bot server must therefore be running in an environment that can be accessed from the web. We chose to simply redeploy to heroku with every change; this was certainly not the best design decision, and looking back is something we would have done differently. However, to "run" the bot you must simply make any changes you wish and then push to heroku. It is always running therefore and can be messages on Facebook. No webhook is required to wake sleeping dynos, since everything is done through webhooks.

Deployment

The server is deployed on Heroku. No persistent storage is set up because all data is sent to the separate backend where it is stored. Currently plan to deploy the server on heroku with a free mongodb.

Usage

Location Based Responses

Through Facebook Messenger's mobile interface a user is able to send their location to DartBot. DartBot then returns information about the closest tour landmark. The bot also handles sending responses that are above Facebook's character limit.

Responding to Inquiries

Using botkit's "hears" method, we have the bot listen to certain key words and respond with an answer provide by the admin.

Prompting users for feedback

When the user says the secret key work "tour", the bot prompts the user to answer a feedback question about the tour, that the admin is able to provide on the admin-side of the site. The bot randomly selects a survey question from the backend and then receives the response from the user. The response is recorded and sent to the backend for analytics for the admin.

Authors

Robin, Alma, Ian, Ahsan, Larissa

Acknowledgments

Wit.ai, howdyai/Botkit on github